How we keep every article we publish permanently accessible, citable, and verifiable.
PublicPast: Journal of Public History is an open-access scholarly journal, and the scholarship it publishes is meant to remain available long after the current issue has passed. This policy sets out how PublicPast preserves its published content so that articles remain accessible, citable, and unaltered over the long term, independently of the continued operation of any single server, service, or domain.
This policy applies to all content published by PublicPast, including:
PublicPast's approach to preservation rests on four principles.
PublicPast preserves its content through several complementary layers. Each serves a different purpose, and together they protect against technical failure, organisational change, and loss of the journal's own website.
| Layer | What it preserves | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| PublicPast platform | HTML article pages at PPI URLs, downloadable PDFs, and metadata | The primary, authoritative version of each article |
| Zenodo | A PDF copy of each published article, with descriptive metadata | Independent long-term preservation with a permanent DOI |
| Internet Archive | Captures of PublicPast web pages through the Wayback Machine | An independent, publicly verifiable record of the site as published |
| OAI-PMH | Article metadata, openly harvestable | Allows repositories and indexing services to discover and record the journal's content |
The authoritative version of every article is the HTML page published at its PublicPast Identifier (PPI) URL on publicpast.org. Articles are published first as HTML. A PDF is generated from the published article and offered for download, and it is this PDF that is deposited for preservation elsewhere.
Where a preserved copy and the PublicPast page differ in any respect, the PPI page, including any correction or retraction notice displayed on it, is the authoritative record.
Every published article is deposited in Zenodo, an open research repository operated by CERN and supported by the European Union's research infrastructure, which was designed for the long-term preservation of research outputs. Zenodo assigns each deposit a permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and guarantees retention of deposited files for the lifetime of the repository.
The Zenodo DOI is a preservation identifier. It points to the preserved PDF and remains valid even if publicpast.org becomes unavailable. It does not replace the PPI, which remains the primary and recommended citation URL for each article.
PublicPast pages, including the home page, issue pages, article pages at PPI URLs, and policy pages, are captured by the Internet Archive and are available through its Wayback Machine. These captures provide an independent, dated record of how the journal and its articles appeared at the time of capture.
Captures are refreshed periodically, and new articles are submitted for capture after publication. Because the Internet Archive is operated independently of PublicPast, it also serves as a safeguard should the journal's website become unavailable.
PublicPast publishes and preserves articles in open, widely supported formats that can be read without proprietary software.
Bibliographic metadata is made available through an OAI-PMH endpoint, the standard protocol used by repositories and indexing services to harvest scholarly metadata. Metadata is kept consistent across the PublicPast page, the Zenodo record, and the OAI-PMH feed, and is updated across all three if a correction requires it.
Each article is identified by a PublicPast Identifier (PPI), which also forms its permanent URL. A PPI is assigned once, never changed, and never reused. If the structure or design of the website changes in future, PPI URLs will continue to resolve to the correct articles.
Full details are set out in the PublicPast Identifier (PPI) Policy.
Published articles are not silently altered. Any substantive change is made through a visible correction notice in line with our Corrections & Retractions policy and the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
All content published by PublicPast is open access and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. This licence permits the deposit and long-term preservation of articles by Zenodo, the Internet Archive, and similar services. Preserved copies are freely available to anyone, without registration or charge, and carry the same licence as the original article.
PublicPast is committed to the long-term availability of the scholarship it publishes, and has arranged its preservation so that it does not depend on the journal's own infrastructure alone.
Digital preservation practice changes as technology and standards change. This policy is reviewed at least once a year by the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board and is updated whenever PublicPast's arrangements change. PublicPast may in future adopt additional preservation or registration services, such as DOI registration through an agency like Crossref, and will update this policy when it does.
Earlier versions of this policy remain available on request.
For questions about the preservation of a specific article, including help locating a preserved copy or reporting a problem with a DOI or archived record, please contact us directly.
